Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Vinnie Mirchandani of deal architect fame graciously invited me to contribute to his guest column ‘Technology and Hobby’ on his New Florence New Renaissance Blog. This very popular column covers the hobbies of some of the heavy hitters in the technology business with a focus on the role of tech.

Some of folks who write about Social Computing / Enterprise 2.0 that you might recognize are Oliver Marks (Restoring Cars),  Ray Wang (Vinyl DJ), Dennis Howlett (Home Brewing), Michael Krigsman (Photography) and Bob Warfield (Hot-Rodding, etc).

No surprise to most who know me that I chose to write about the culinary craft. For me, there’s always been a parallel to be drawn between crafting strategy and execution plans, and the constructing of a perfect dish.

The photo above is my very amateur photography attempt at capturing a pic of Chili and Fermented Black Bean Prawns that I made last week, for my visiting parents.

I had a blast writing it up. Here’s the full post to see another side of me on Vinnie’s blog. -)

In response to my post on Five ways to Avoid Enterprise 2.0 Failure, the very clever Martin Koser led a hilarious discussion on “why not to get on the Enterprise 2.0 Journey.”

Some gems:

#7 who needs to attract new employees anyway?

#10 We are running on Windows NT (alternative: AS/40)

#10b Who needs E20 if he can have IE7?

#15 As long as SAP doesn’t offer it it’s not relevant

#24 We have never work beyond carrots & sticks

Skim through the comments on this posterous blog, for the other 29.

Quick post to tell you that I’m very happy to be appointed to TechWebs Enterprise 2.0 conference advisory board.

Last week conference Chair Steve Wylie and I got together in San Francisco to chat about what social business ecosystems will look like as we move past this early stage of defining and justifying open collaborative environments between employees, partners, customers and suppliers. As important, what it’s going to take to truly accelerate business performance via social computing constructs and technologies.

It quickly became clear that the time to start talking about this, is now. Joining the advisory board allows me to participate with some very smart folks on addressing these issues.

Thanks again to Steve for the invite. And thanks to everyone in the E 2.0 community for their good wishes and support.

About the Conference:

Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process.

Beyond discussion of the “why”, there will also be in-depth opportunities for learning the “how” that will help you bring Enterprise 2.0 to your business.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board is comprised of leading experts in the fields of technology for business, collaboration, culture change and collective intelligence.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Google ChromeOS announcement and its impact on the Enterprise. Disqus, one of my all-time favorite blog tools, dutifully posted Social Media reactions across Twitter and Friendfeed. However, the most spirited debate sparked by this post happened not in my blog comments or on Twitter. It happening on Facebook as I write this. Here’s what’s there, so far.

(sorry for the low res pic. Ill update with another one as soon as I can)

Want to know who these very smart folks are? Too bad.

The irony here is that Facebook and LinkedIn do allow my friends, who have never heard of each other, to have a discussion. And Facebook is happy to make it very easy to pull in my blog RSS feed to spark that discussion. So why not let Disqus expose this to all my friends on other networks. If you must, insist that a participant sign in or sign up to your network to add to the discussion, but expose the damn conversation, will ya?

I get that LinkedIn and Facebook sprouted back when it was all about creating closed networks and these platforms have adapted since then but the willingness to let specific conversations seep out is woefully tepid. Had you let MY social network (of which any one platform controls but a small fraction) see the discussion ensuing on YOUR service, between very smart people in YOUR network , my guess is that more people would be inclined to engage on your platform. And maybe others would be compelled to sign-up if they haven’t already done so.

But no – you’re so hell bent on keeping Google’s crawler in the dark that you’re willing to prevent plenty of super smart people on my other networks from participating in a great conversation that you facilitated.

User engagement on a blog post or other social objects (photos, videos etc) that I syndicate into Facebook is a true showcase of intent, and that’s gotta mean higher CPMs for you. That’s much better than silly defensive tactics such as copying FriendFeed/Twitters UI that early adopters like me might appreciate but alienate your mainstream users.

You’re just cutting your nose to spite your face.

End of rant.

Update: After writing this it got me thinking about the TechCrunch Real Time Crunch Up that’s underway right now.  Its great that were discussing this topic but really, what’s the point of real-time anything in the context of the social web, when two of the largest social networks throttle output to any real time engine.

I’m headed over there this afternoon. Lets see if this topic comes up.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston ended earlier this week. This post covers my overall impressions about the conference material. Apologies in advance for a longish post.

Overall Thoughts

Given my insane meeting schedule and my objectives for the conference, I used 3 criteria to pick sessions. Here’s what I was looking for:

a) Practitioners before cheerleaders, skeptics and early adopters. Were there enough practitioners in attendance?

b) Did the event generate adequate tangible advice to show practitioners what works and what doesn’t, how to sell this internally, and finally, how to drive adoption?

c) Did the environment encourage their participation?

Two Thumbs Up to the first 2 questions. As to C, so, so. There were a good number of practitioners from companies such as BoA, Raytheon, Alcatel-Lucent, Allstate, Humana, M&M Mars & Eli Lilly. And a good number of tactical sessions. So in my book, all up, I think the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work.

On the other hand, the conference was a bit too Vendor centric – not in terms of attendance necessarily but in terms of who had a louder voice. There were in fact a lot of practitioners in the audience. I just wish their stories could have been heard.

A quick disclaimer: This re-cap reflects my favorites from sessions I attended; not across all available sessions. I missed some superb stuff but I’m sure others will speak to those.

The Good Stuff

Looking at it from a practitioners standpoint, what impressed me most was heavy weighting towards content on tactical insights that practitioners can use when they get to work, tomorrow. Sessions covered some long range thinking but plenty of actionable tricks and how tos that can let implementers and program managers sleep well at night.

Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. The session was peppered with clever, even quirky tips such as a button called “shady” for questionable content that needed moderation, to creating stickers as invite codes that a user can distribute at their discretion. Genentech for instance, calls their social network GenePool and they tell their users “don’t pee in the pool”, as a way to encourage clean, relevant interaction. Again, not brain surgery but tactical marketing ideas that generate buzz. Ben Kepes of Cloud Ave was nice enough to live blog the session, here.

Another favorite session was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption, that showcased specific details on how to manage separation anxiety when transitioning from 1.0 to social computing environments.  For instance, Lee described methods to illustrate the similarities between an RSS Reader and Email on a Blackberry. How to highlight the customizable nature of a social network over a static phone book. Or how to gently transition from a stogy old one way Intranet to a by-directional collaboration platform. All in all, tricks that a practitioner can act on soon after returning from the conference. For a more detailed analysis, Sandy Kemsley has a great write up, here.

I’m a little biased here because I read or listen to pretty much anything Marc Smith and Kate Niederhoffer say or write and because I believe that Analytics/Intelligence is going to be a huge differentiator in this space. So it was a treat to attend Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc, Kate and Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. I’m convinced that articulating the sociological and psychological (respectively) considerations as a catalyst for Enterprise 2.0 transformation can play a big role towards both executive buy in and successful execution. Moreover, my sense is that correlating the use of social computing as a way to respond to (not change) basic human nature can make it all seem achievable and less daunting. Contrast that with sermons on the glories of wiki based collaboration or the promise of orgasmic levels of workforce liberation via the use of a Twitter-like public status update. I wish this session was not at the tail end of the conference. We need more of this, up front.

Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta was possibly one of the best research efforts I’ve seen on the topic of Enterprise Social Networking. Mike does a superb job of objectively “telling it like it is” whether its vendor capabilities/holes or inherent execution considerations such as the focus on deployment when it should be on adoption, or the threat to middle management and the curse of social caste systems. Lots of lessons not only for adoption but also excellent material to set expectations with LOB executives on risks that need to be mitigated, upfront. Bill Ives has an excellent post on this session, here.

Again, there were others that also had good insights. And I think the baseline research done for Open Enterprise is a treasure chest.

On to the sub optimal stuff.

Conference Format – Get Micro: Some of the most repeatable ideas and common problem sets I heard surfaced in conversations over dinner and in the reception area. Many from senior program managers, architects, and even executives who were ridiculously smart but not necessarily the kind that want to walk up to a microphone in a 300 seat auditorium.  Early lifecycle categories such as E2.0 need more casual break out sessions to foster discussions where repeatable problems, ideas and insights emerge. These off hand discussions I had included insight such as the limitations and possibilities of leveraging social computing tools on the BlackBerry. Which vendor apps really afford a customer centric mobile interaction model vs. those that are simply riding the polish and hype that comes with the iPhone developer platform. What’s particularly working for sales reps in their orgs? And on and on. My sense is that a lot of good insight was left of the table and we need a format that brings these topics to the surface.

Objectivity: This certainly wasn’t germane to most sessions but in some cases, there needed to be a clear distinction between research findings and objectivity on behalf of the speaker. When it’s research, it needs to be presented as findings, not tilted towards the preferences or enthusiasm of the speaker. And when an expert, who happens to be a vendor, is invited to a topical panel, little less product highlighting and more industry based knowledge sharing needs to be enforced. If I feel like I need to hire you (as a consultant) or buy your product (as a vendor) to really get the benefit of your opinion, then something’s lost.

Closing

So, as a practitioner, I think the conference brought a lot of actionable learning to the table and that’s a big win.

Personally, I can’t put a price on what I got out of these 4 days. I got to meet and thank a ton of folks who comment here on Pretzel Logic. I met folks whose stuff I read and learn from, every day. We exchanged a lot of ideas, opined on what’s hot and what doesn’t have legs in the space. We closed down bars.

This is the first of a series of posts on the conference. Next up are take aways on the space, distribution models and what customers should be asking of service providers.

Finally, a big thanks to Susan Scrupski – I might not have made the trip out but I did, and for that I’m grateful to her.

Other posts on the Conference:

My pal Gil Yehuda wrote a post yesterday about meeting logistics at Enterprise 2.0. I encourage you to read it and see if you can gain from his suggestions.

Gil’s post got me to write about how I expect the conference to play out for me.

• I’m part of the press corps so first and foremost, I plan to look for stuff that interests me so I can write about it. Pretzel Logic (this blog) is about Enterprise 2.0 execution and the social software landscape. To that end, I’m going to be looking for customer case studies that moved the needle in terms of business acceleration. As important, solution providers that really make it happen. No spray and pray, “the enterprise just needs to get social” stuff. I hope to debate, contest and cheer meaningful success stories.
• As my close E2.0 pals know, my plan was to be as fluid as possible for the next few months, on the career/work front. And I’m up to my eyeballs in consulting work at the moment, per plan.  A big component of my work goes beyond the “what” and into the “how” and “why”. So knowing vendor capabilities is important to successfully tie the right solution to business problems at hand. Lots of new announcements too.
• Beyond this, I’ve got partner meetings that I’ve scheduled since I’m out east.

Nothing on the list above is what I consider tedious work. The social calendar looks tremendous. And I’ve left plenty of time for serendipitous encounters. So I’m stoked.

Looking forward to going back to my old hometown.

Just heard about the passing of Professor Rajeev Motwani. Professor Motwani was a   household name in Silicon Valley, most notably for giving early guidance to Larry and Sergey and investing in Google. I had the pleasure of meeting him a few years back and I distinctly remember how gracious he was with his time and perspectives. Om puts it best in his post on GigaOM “There wasn’t a startup he didn’t love”.

He listened intently and I still remember his amazing ability to process a lot of information in a few minutes and provide extremely pointed feedback. You knew he was engaged and interested. I’m sure he’s touched a lot of people in Silicon Valley more recently and he will be missed.

If you never had the opportunity to cross paths with him, take a look at the twitter stream right now and you’ll get a sense of how many people he touched.

My deepest condolences to his family and to those close to him. Wish you all the strength during this tough time.

Rest in peace. You will be missed.

Update: Since the writing of this post, Techmeme has some additional overage including 2 very touching posts by and Sergey Brin and David Hornik.